Stories of Change

Despite the amount of storytelling in social movements, little attention has been paid to narrative as a form of movement discourse or as a mode of social interaction. Stories of Change is a systematic study of narrative as well as a demonstration of the power of narrative analysis to illuminate many features of contemporary social movements. Davis includes a wide array of stories of change—stories of having been harmed or wronged, stories of conflict with unjust authorities, stories of liberation and empowerment, and stories of strategic success and failure. By showing how these stories are a powerful vehicle for producing, regulating, and diffusing shared meaning, the contributors explore movement stories, their functions, and the conditions under which they are created and performed. They show how narrative study can illuminate social movement emergence, recruitment, internal dynamics, and identity building.

Acknowledgments

PART ONE: Narrative and the Sociology of Social Movements

1. Narrative and Social Movements The Power of Stories

The past two decades have witnessed a great flowering in writing about
narrative and the effort by a wide variety of scholars to incorporate it
into their disciplines. The study of narrative in fiction has, of course, long
been central to literary theory. More recently, however, narrative study
has moved out of English Departments to...

2. Plotting Protest: Mobilizing Stories in the 1960 Student Sit-Ins

On February 1, 1960, four black students from Greensboro Agricultural
and Technical College purchased a few items in the downtown
Woolworth and then sat down at its whites-only lunch counter. Told that
they could not be served, they remained seated until the store closed. They
resumed the sit-in the next day and the next, joined by other students...

3. Controlling Narratives and Narratives as Control within Social Movements

As the essays in this volume demonstrate, narrations constitute a pervasive
and influential form of activity for collective actors across a wide
array of social movements—be they concerned with politics, religion, or
lifestyle. My interest in this chapter is not with the form or content of
such stories; nor am I concerned with how collective action narratives are...

PART TWO: Analysis of Narrative in Social Movements

As the opening epigraph suggests, this chapter will discuss narrative as
a fundamental resource for achieving a coherent understanding of
human action, both at the individual and, since there is an inescapable tie
between the two (Mead 1934, 1978), the communal levels. Narrative’s
overarching significance in social life is perhaps nowhere more clearly and...

5. Moving Toward the Light: Self, Other, and the Politics of Experience in New Age Narratives

To read R. D. Laing’s work today is to revisit an era—temporally close,
temperamentally distant—when a renowned psychiatrist could conclude
a book with fifteen pages of LSD-inspired word salad and still produce
a bestseller.1 Laing claimed that self-estrangement was ubiquitous in
American society, and he blamed it on resistance to the truth of inner...

6. Fundamentalism: When History Goes Awry

Religious fundamentalism is a complex and diverse phenomenon. Fundamentalist
movements are a highly contingent, historically specific
set of local, regional, and national movements operating toward any
number of discrete ends: some expressly political, some cultural, some theological,
and most, various combinations of all three. As a global concept, ...

7. Drug Court Stories: Transforming American Jurisprudence

Recent social movement scholarship has usefully shifted attention to the
important cultural variables that drive and give meaning to social
movements—a focus that was given limited attention for many years. In
this chapter, I analyze an important movement within the American criminal
justice system that gives empirical support to the legitimacy of this new...

8. Compassion on Trial: Movement Narrative in a Court Conflict over Physician-Assisted Suicide

One of the salutary effects of the recent cultural shift in social movements
research has been to focus new attention on the stories told
within movements by their members (Fine 1995; many of the chapters in
this volume). The study of such “internal narratives” yields insight into
many of the movement’s features, including how group culture is...

In the mid-1970s, a relatively loose coalition of feminists, academics,
mental health professionals, and social workers first mobilized to define
domestic violence as an urgent social problem. This initial coalition and
the attention it generated from policy makers, the media, and the public
launched the “battered women’s movement.” Employing an analysis...

PART THREE: Conclusion

10. The Storied Group: Social Movements as “Bundles of Narratives”

One cannot predict when one’s claims will hit a nerve. This book represents
a reflex to a casual, if insistent, tap. As a scholar whose work
explored the areas of small groups (Fine 1979, 1982), folk narrative (Fine
1992), organizational culture (Fine 1984), and collective behavior
(Rosnow and Fine 1976; Fine and Stoecker 1985), I had been interested in...

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